In the Flesh: The Curse s1e02 'Pressure's Looking Good So Far'

“Here it comes,” says casino employee Bill (David DeLao) to Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder) as they wait together for the gaming floor’s overhead lighting to shift. This is Asher’s sole apparent contribution to the world, a lighting scheme designed to subliminally encourage gamblers to keep gambling. Not only that, but his original patterns had to be adjusted to produce the desired effect. It’s dust in a sandstorm, just another finger reaching into the pockets of tourists and gambling addicts. ‘Pressure’s Looking Good So Far’, the second episode of Fielder and Benny Safdie’s The Curse, is intimately concerned with questions of authorship, creativity, and responsibility. Did Dougie (Safdie) kill his wife by driving over the legal limit, even if he wasn’t legally at fault in the accident that took her life? Did Asher invent the casino’s new anglerfish lure, or was it the nameless person who reprogrammed the lighting cycle? Entire lives, entire towns and communities turn on such trivialities.

Cara’s (Nizhonniya Austin) art show functions as a kind of thematic key for the rest of the episode. Does it have power, or doesn’t it? Is it meaningful, or meaningless? Is the deli turkey Cara’s flesh, or a self-serious piece of performance art by a clever but listless native artist playing to a crowd of insipid bobblehead white people? “Is that it?” asks Pueblo mayor James Toledo (Gary Farmer) after Cara unleashes an anguished scream at close quarters. “Yes,” she replies serenely. An attendant instructs each guest to “refrain from discussing your experiences in the structure” as they exit Cara’s tipi, an ominous little phrase that could serve as a logline for the Siegels’ lives. Stone and Fielder are putting in strong work building uniquely hollow, vacant people desperate to make their public personas the sum total of their being, to hide at all costs any trace of how the proverbial sausage is made. Think of Whitney’s (Emma Stone) houses, covered in mirrors to “reflect the community”, themselves reflecting another artist’s work, their existence paradoxically concealed by the very thing intended to make them notable.

The agonizing cringe cyber-infiltration sequence is very fun, a genuinely Kafkaesque workplace nightmare, but it’s the Siegels’ visit to Whitney’s OBGYN that brings together the episode’s themes of creation, imitation, exploitation, and social posturing. It also serves as a deft little flourish for the series’ throughline of the paradoxical white obsession with and indifference toward the Pueblo. In the wake of finding out their hoped-for pregnancy is ectopic and needs to be terminated, Asher ruminates as Whitney diverts her attention to a different sort of creation. She suggests doing their next property in the Pueblo style, incorporating a mosaic twist on her own signature mirrored exterior. “I don’t think anybody’s ever done a design like that,” she says of a stolen conceit crudely overlaid with a stolen culture without a hint of irony. If you empty yourself out enough, The Curse seems to be saying, eventually anything you look at will feel like your own inner life, like an extension of yourself. You’re so vacant, so pure in your vacuous self-absorption, that the entire world is one big mirror showing you your own rehearsed and veneered smile.